Stout, Rex: (37) Homicide Trinity

Enough of this imitation Archie Goodwin; I want the real thing. So I got a couple of books out of Yale’s library, including the collection Homicide Trinity (one of the more generically named ones). I grabbed this because it has “Counterfeit for Murder,” which has Hattie Annis, who is one of my favorite characters ever in a Nero Wolfe book. (How can you not like someone who calls Wolfe Falstaff?) I’d forgotten, though, that the other two stories are quite good too. The first is the hideously named “Eeny Meeny Murder Mo,” a satisfying little story about yet another person killed in Wolfe’s office. (This was adapted by A&E recently, though annoyingly I can’t remember if the denouement was presented the same way.) The other is “Death of a Demon,” which starts with a woman telling Wolfe, “That’s the gun I’m not going to shoot my husband with”—except that he’s already been shot, by someone else. This was a pleasant surprise with which to pass dinner.

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